Sixth Straight Year in the Beautiful Catskills

As a farmer, physical work grounds me. As a poet, I crave the soaring place poetry takes me, but know I still need grounding. As a poet, I live between a waking dream state and a sensual grounded place.

“Embodied Writing concerns itself with capturing the expression of human experience in a way that elicits ‘sympathetic resonance,’ or a natural response through which a reader ‘vibrates’ empathically with the writer when reading or listening to a written piece.”

“African-American history is so rife with really important information that most people never know. And when I say most, I am including black people and all American people. We just do not know African-American history in this country. I thought, I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss an opportunity to not insert very significant events. “

I believe that journalism benefits from a strong sense of values, such as justice and humanitarian instinct, but it is best practiced without political activism. A journalists’ allegiance is to the truth. A good journalist is always open to changing her mind based on the evidence, and political activism doesn’t tend to work that way.
– Anne Nelson

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be.

What people don’t appreciate, is how much nature there is in urban settings. And how crucial those urban settings are. For instance, NYC in on what we call the Eastern Flyway (there are several of these, east to west, which are migratory routes for birds in spring and fall). In spring, birds in their bright, colorful breeding plumage drop into Central Park, among other places in the NYC area, and draw birders from around the world, including as far away from Russia.

People are wont to read with their own biases and agendas that we cannot control, and having early readers who come from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives may help a writer at least get a sense of the types of issues that might be misinterpreted.

A poem that uses nature or an historical figure to talk about love expands the reader’s understanding of love and opens new vistas of self-awareness. Poetry has the power to help us examine ourselves and provides us with a psycho-spiritual roadmap for evolution.